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About conditions and closures

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Mediation and kinds of unity

Something there is that doesn't love a wall...

A third, related large-scale philosophical tactic in this study is to watch for the ways in which the conditions that make unities and identities and places possible also make impossible completely closed (or completely open and homeless) unities and identities and places.

-- This sounds like standard deconstructive appropriations of Kant on understanding and reason. But who needs perfect closure, or perfect openness anyway? And don't current identities come near enough to complete closure and/or homelessness, depending on the place?

-- Current identities do not come as near to closure as critics think who have ideological reasons for emphasizing some purported total domination or total change in places today. When the conditions that make places possible are closely examined, they demand that there always be openings into possibilities or contexts beyond any empirical closures. Similarly the conditions for being within places and the process of meaning-making always put us within some historical projects and contexts. We are never emptily searching for arbitrary content.

That said, you are right that in practice many contemporary places can enforce strong closure or homelessness effects -- or both, working together to produce alienation. Even, so knowing that these effects cannot be total encourages us to look for cracks and for new possibilities.